


born to hustle roses down the avenue of the dead

by fitzroysquare



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Angst, Boeshane Peninsula, Character Study, Child Soldiers, Death, Killing, War, references to Big Finish's Audio Broken, references to Big Finish's Audio Month 25, references to s1e4: Cyberwoman
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-18
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-14 03:40:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29536257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fitzroysquare/pseuds/fitzroysquare
Summary: Sometimes the world needs someone to make the hard choices. Jack Harkness is usually that person.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 10





	born to hustle roses down the avenue of the dead

**Author's Note:**

> thank you to nik for editing!  
> ...  
> title taken from Charles Bukowski's poem Consummation of Grief

Jack Harkness knows death.

He knows how it feels to claw out of the nauseating shroud of darkness, gasping back to consciousness with every nerve in his body burning at the sudden infusion of life. He knows how it tastes - the biting, metallic tang of his blood coating his throat as his guts seek to exit out of his mouth and onto his clothes on his way to meet Death. He knows what it sounds like, from the gasps of his own labored breaths to the terrified moans and begs of others too young to go. And lastly, he knows how it smells, the rotting flesh of human and non-alike, when bodies desiccate for days under the heat of the sun because they fall faster than the graves can be dug.

Dying is everything in the world, all at once. But after that single moment in time passes, dying becomes nothing. Except if you’re Jack Harkness - then that single moment in time is never really ever over.

: :

“I killed him. I've still got blood on my hands,” Gwen Cooper says, just a few hours after Ed Morgan dies because of a knife that was held between her two hands.

“He killed himself,” Jack says in response, and he means it. If anyone should know what killing someone is, it’s Jack.

He’s done it in self-defense, at point-blank, while laughing, while crying, in the shower, mid-sex, with his eyes closed, with his legs tied, with conviction in his heart, with dread drowning out all his thoughts. Hell, he even has a missing two years that’s entirely all murder.

But to explain exactly how he knows about the finer details of what it means to kill someone would draw attention to the stain of blood coating his hands, and that’s the last thing Jack wants Gwen to see. “Look, the sun’s coming up,” Jack decides to say instead, trying to get Gwen to focus on the promise of tomorrow. It’s a new day in Cardiff, and the most important lesson Jack thinks he can teach Gwen is how to move on, no matter what.

It’s something he wishes he learned how to do sooner than he did. Sometimes it’s something he wishes he never learned at all.

: :

The first time Jack, or Private Javic Piotr Thane as he’s known then, is given a chance to kill someone, he doesn’t take it.

He has a perfect shot, his Enemy standing point-blank in front of him weaponless, but all he can see in the crosshairs of his scope is Gray’s face. His hands shake as much as his Enemy begs for mercy, and he wonders if pulling the trigger of a gun, taking a life, is something that he can live with. He’s not really sure, and so he puts down his blaster and tells his Enemy to run, watching them fade into the horizon all the while hoping that his father would be proud of him.

This act of mercy isn’t something he regrets until six hours later when his platoon is ambushed by the Enemy, led by the one he let go, and seven of his fellow soldiers end the day in pieces on nearby bushes like holiday ornaments.

As he resists the urge to puke his guts out as he collects pieces of blown up flesh from the shrubbery, he promises himself that this is a mistake that he’ll never make again. If he didn’t know what he was fighting for before, he does now.

: :

“You execute her or I’ll execute you both,” Jack tells Ianto, his gun pointed at the man’s head. Gwen will tell him later that he’d never have shot Ianto, not really, and Jack will think that for someone who seems to know him so well, she’s still somehow missing the point when it comes to him.

Killing isn’t about would or wouldn’t, not when the person in question is already so used to shedding blood that doesn’t belong to them. It’s about did or didn’t, and when it came to Ianto, Jack didn’t. To him, that’s the only thing that matters in the grand scheme of things.

A person, especially an immortal one, would go crazy if they had to think about all the things that could’ve happened as much as the things that did happen. And Jack’s made it through too much to go crazy now.

: :

The day Javic is promoted to corporal, he finds himself hunched over a body belonging to someone he doesn’t know, pressing down on their bloody chest wound with his hands in an attempt to slow the bleeding caused by the sharp talons of the Enemy.

It’s no use - the wound is too big, and the blood is flowing too quickly from the body that the person underneath his hands no longer screams from the pain. It’s only the soft, involuntary choking sounds emerging from their mouth that lets Javic know that there’s still life left to fight for. But as the blood from the chest wound stains his hands dark red, beginning to drip down on the ground, all Javic can think about is how much his back hurts and how annoying cleaning the blood off his sleeves is going to be.

: :

“Oh God, I killed you,” Ianto says with a look of dawning realization, months after the Saviour and Abaddon. “You were dead. I killed you.”

“No. You saved me,” Jack says in response, and he means it. Ianto could’ve left him, could’ve just sat over his body when he heard the stillness of Jack’s heart, but instead, Ianto began CPR, never believing him truly dead. And because of that, Jack never really was.

Death isn’t a fact - even to someone who isn’t immortal - not when it’s a negotiation that every person has to make that ends in a final decision that can be different from another person’s. Explaining this to Ianto would draw attention to all the people Jack has left behind not knowing if they could’ve been saved in the end, and while Jack doesn’t want Ianto to see the uglier parts of him that he doesn’t even like thinking about, he tries to find the words to explain anyway. Because for some reason, Jack desperately wants Ianto to know that sometimes, death is something that you can fight against because sometimes, someone only dies once you give up on them.

: :

The first time Jack sees an entire planet die, it’s not because of a cataclysmic explosion or the death of its sun but because of the rapid onset of a runaway greenhouse effect laying waste to everything on the surface. Just a single glimpse is enough to make him cry for all the people and possibilities lost with the planet.

The second time Jack sees a planet die, it’s one that’s been devoid of all life for over a thousand years. He cries even harder than he did the first time.

: :

The base where Javic is stationed hasn’t been attacked in three weeks, and with no access to the interweb on top of the no fraternization rule, the only thing he’s in danger of dying of is boredom. He’s not alone - his entire platoon is bored to the point where they’ve made a competition out of seeing who can spit the farthest.

Cleaning his weapon for what he feels is the hundredth time that day, Javic silently prays that his company will be attacked soon just so he can do something that isn’t staring at the sky. It’s not that he wants to be torn to shreds or do that to another living person; he just can’t stand living in these stretches of nothingness when he knows what’s inevitably coming for him just over the horizon.

: :

Head up and face on is the best way to die, Jack thinks as he stares down the three Daleks in front of him. His story is going to end a thousand lightyears and a hundred thousand years away from home, but there’s nothing in his life he regrets, least of all standing up for the right thing for what it seems like the first time in his life. If anything, he’s glad that he’s going out like this - fighting for a good cause instead of running away out of self-preservation like he would’ve during his con-man days. It comforts him in his last moments that he’s dying as Jack Harkness and not Javic Thane, a boy who never did anything other than what his demons or impulses told him to do.

: :

Despite looking forward to this homecoming since the day he left, Jack, or private citizen Javic Piotr Thane as he’s known then, wants to run away the moment his feet touch the white sands of Boeshane Peninsula.

Everytime Jack thinks he’s starting to relax, starting to reintegrate back into the place of his birth, there’s something new that serves to remind him how much things have changed in the time he has been gone. The kids who he used to tower over are almost the same height as him, and the elders who used to look down at him now have to look up. And him - he’s different, too, from the boy he used to be. He’s now a person meant for action, not rest, and feels more ruined the longer he stays planetbound. He wants purpose, a life where decisions matter, that rush of adrenaline spiking through his body. He wants something like war.

The Time Agency promises to give him all of that and more. Jack ends up with two missing years and the screams of the dead in his nightmares because of it.

: :

Killing someone means taking away everything they have and everything they will ever have.

When Steven Carter dies because of the choice he makes, Jack forces himself to watch as his body seizes and falls, memorizing every twitch and breath so he has the mental ammunition to haunt himself in the very remotest of places. Steven dies, and every day for the next thousand years, Jack sees Steven’s face in the darkest corners of his mind and regrets everything he’s ever done. The next thousand years after that, his memory of Steven’s face fades, but the regret doesn’t.

He would still do it all again if he had to.

**Author's Note:**

> someone take away my computer or else im just gonna keep writing jack character studies


End file.
